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I chose the word "beyond" advisedly. CRM is far, far from dead or
even in decline, so "after" would be completely incorrect. However, CRM
already has changed so much that it may be time to rethink it. Also,
many of the tangential technologies that have turbocharged CRM in the
last few years, like social media, have attracted so much attention --
not all of it good -- that some analysis is due.

First, I'll state the obvious: CRM is not in eclipse. It's a
US$30-plus billion industry with a bright future. The greenfield days
have passed, though. Most companies that need it have gotten at least
some CRM apps -- but probably not enough.

More telling, most of the sales organizations that ought to be using CRM are doing so poorly, suggests a CSO Insights
report ,
"Running Up the Down Escalator." Those businesses' sales processes
aren't efficient or productive. CRM adoption is not what it should be,
and there's plenty of room for greater implementation.

On the other hand, we're entering Q2 and trade show season. Two weeks
ago, I was in San Francisco for Salesforce's TrailheaDX developers'
conference; last week I attended the company's World Tour in Boston.
Next week I'll be in Chicago for Oracle's Modern Customer Experience
conference -- and from what I've seen and been briefed on, the new
solutions on offer are very cool. The quarter continues with trips to
Las Vegas, San Francisco (again) and elsewhere.

Risk, Loss and Trust

CRM is vibrant. Still, its role and nature continue to change. It once
was seen as an efficiency tool and a commoditization of expensive IT.
The combination of cloud computing (commoditization) and database
management techniques over customer data (efficiency) raised performance
and expectations of what we could achieve in the front office.

Last year, only 53 percent of sales people made or exceeded quota
compared to 63 percent five years earlier, according to the CSO Insights
report. Well over half of sales organizations operate like the
gunslingers at the O.K. Corral, flailing at their markets instead of
using technology to bring order, precision and efficiency to their
tasks.

On the other hand, marketers have gained access to sophisticated
tools that enable them to take the randomness out of their efforts,
replacing it with accurate programs designed to appeal to targeted
needs. Of course, many marketing organizations still have not
internalized these ideas. Their output resembles pasta on a wall,
because the technology has made it so inexpensive to spray and pray.

With each new revelation of a data breach, the business community
shudders as vendors attempt to deal with risk, loss and irate customers.
At the same time, customers quake at another possibility -- that their
identities could be stolen and their futures ruined. With almost daily
revelations, trust -- especially in social media -- has taken a hit.

In the efforts around platforms and development technologies, I can
see renewal and reason for optimism. We are in an era of consolidation
through mergers and integration into huge suites of functionality. Point
solutions are still viable, but increasingly they have been coming to
market as components of larger ecosystems based on a few prevailing
platforms, such as the AppExchange. That's a trend I expect to continue
in CRM's next stage.

Here are some recommendations for that stage:

For individual users, the path forward in CRM is to adopt the new
development technologies in order to customize apps beyond anything a
vendor, even one in an industry vertical, can provide.

Customers should demand, and vendors should give, much better data
security. That's a requirement if we expect our society, already highly
dependent on data and information, to progress further in that
direction. New business structures for safeguarding data, along with new
certifications and a code of ethics, have to be part of the mix --
beginning with encryption.

There's ample data suggesting that employees and the public now look
to CEOs to articulate visions beyond profit and loss that position
businesses as responsible corporate citizens. Young people are selecting
job offers based on this, according to a survey by Povaddo, which said
that more than half (57 percent) of those working in America's largest
companies felt that their employers should play a more active role in
addressing important societal issues.

My Two Bits

CRM began life with a heavy emphasis on management, but over time the
attention paid to relationships has grown as we've added necessary
functionality to shift focus. Interestingly, the emphasis on AI and
machine learning has reduced much of the rote effort to manage
situations while freeing up employee time to do what humans do very
well: relate to each other.

That's one reason relationships and CRM have become so central to
business life. Another reason is the convergence of many markets as
earlier disruptions have been embraced and commoditized.

Succeeding today means developing and nurturing relationships more
than it references efficiency. So if you haven't rethought your CRM
deployment in a while, or if you thought you had everything done --
think again. We're in the second half of a close game. The stakes are
high, but there's a lot of fun on the horizon.

A few weeks ago, I started writing about what I
see as the post-CRM world. I think it is becoming clear that
front-office automation is moving past the definition of CRM that we
have become accustomed to. As I look around the industry, there is a
perceptible difference between what software is and what it does, which
goes beyond CRM.

I am not talking about the hosted/on demand/software-as-a-service
phenomenon. At the end of the day, that's important -- but it's all
about the delivery mechanism, not what the products help us do. Beyond
the delivery mechanism is where things are getting interesting. New
application vendors take SaaS in stride as they deliver solutions to
problems that, in many cases, we didn't even know we had. It's those
solutions and the problems that they solve that got me thinking.

While we're definitely in a post-CRM era, believe it or not, things
related to CRM are not the drivers -- they are simply symptoms of a
larger movement, which I call "post-high tech."

High Tech's Legacy

Remember high tech? It started with mini-computers and with putting a
whole CPU on a chip. The excitement caused by that breakthrough in the
technology and finance worlds was palpable. With a cheap CPU on a chip,
all of a sudden all kinds of mechanical and electrical devices could be
optimized with embedded CPUs -- from your car's engine to household
gadgets. Of course, optimization came with a cost. One unfortunate
by-product of the euphoria that came with embedded CPUs was the VCR
clock, but that's a story for another day.

Cheap computing followed, and it accelerated every aspect of
business. For example, the mergers and acquisitions mania of the 1980s
may have been aided by PCs and spreadsheets that let people play out all
sorts of "what if" scenarios as corporate raiders recalculated company
value and interest rates on junk bonds at will.

It took quite a while for the PC to help corporations straighten out
the back office, and when they were done, attention naturally turned to
the front office where similar techniques were applied. With fast
availability of data and query capability, we found it possible to
accelerate all kinds of customer interactions and to make them more
accurate.

Sales force automation was introduced primarily as a way to
accelerate behind-the-scenes sales activities so that representatives
could spend more time with customers -- in effect, optimizing an old
process. SFA was, and still is, sold on the promise of increasing
productivity -- allowing more focus on the customer interaction part of
the job.

Running Smoother

Up to this point, we have used technology in CRM simply to reduce waste
and inefficiency. Like the optimized car, the engine runs better, but
it still burns increasingly expensive fossil fuel and contributes to
global warming. Optimization -- that's the limit of high tech; in the
post-high-tech world, we're expecting cars that run on clean hydrogen
fuel cells.

Similarly, now that we've optimized our business processes, we need
to re-involve the customer. It's no secret that while corporations have
been working hard to optimize their customer-facing processes, the
natives have been getting restless. If you are in doubt, here are some
tidbits accumulated from the last year:

According to a 2004 Gallup International and World Economic Forum study
of 36,000 people from 47 countries, 48 percent had little or no trust in
global companies, and 52 percent had little or no trust for national
companies.

At the same time, New Product News predicted that of the 36,000-plus new
products that hit the shelves in the U.S. in 2005, 80 percent will fail
-- largely because vendors do not understand their customers' needs to
any significant degree.

The loss of customer loyalty is nearly epidemic, and numerous thought leaders have commented on it.

Focusing on the Customer

All that brings me back to the post-high-tech, post-CRM world. In all
the hoopla around the efficiency craze of the last couple of decades,
we've pretty much forgotten about the customer. If we are going to take
business to another level, it won't be because we made our auto-dialers
faster or drilled the best closing techniques into sales
representatives.

In the post-high-tech era, the next level of business is about
listening to the customer, and the value of technology in that scenario
will be in reducing the big job of capturing customer input and
collating it to make it accessible to people who design, make and market
products. New technology will also enable us to invent and profitably
deliver new services that customers need, but which have either been too
expensive to deliver or have not even been thought up yet.

Each year, I see a lot of new companies with different ideas of
software solutions, and the best seem to be focusing on how to leverage
technology to do the unexpected on the way to getting the customer to
say, "Wow!"

That's what I mean when I talk about the post-CRM and now, post-high-tech world.

At IncomeCRM , we are determined to provide organizations with the tools they
need to grow and succeed. That’s why we are excited to announce today
that we have been recognized as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for CRM Lead Management.
Just as we want to help our customers grow better, we want to grow
better ourselves, so we always welcome honest feedback from our
community.

In
its announcement, Gartner explains, “The Gartner Peer Insights
Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified
end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews
and the overall user ratings.” To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner
maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate.

For this distinction, a vendor must
have a minimum of 50 published reviews with an average overall rating of
4.2 stars or higher.

Here’s what some of our customers had to say :

“IncomeCRM is just awesome! Implementation was incredibly easy, their people are
wonderful to work with, and the platform is superior to others we have
used or looked at. Everything works so smoothly without any of the
issues competitors have” - CIO, Services

“IncomeCRM provides almost every marketing and CRM tool that you could imagine, all
within one application. They make it simple to drive inbound leads
through social, email, and landing pages. Their training and support is
unparalleled with IncomeCRM Academy available for all users.” -eCommerce Merchandising Coordinator, Manufacturing

Everyone at IncomeCRM is deeply proud
to be honored as a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for CRM
Lead Management. To learn more about this distinction, or to read the
reviews written about our products by the growth professionals who use
them, please visit Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice announcement.

To all of our customers who submitted
reviews, thank you! Feedback like this is essential as we continue on
our mission to help millions of businesses grow better.

If you have a IncomeCRM story to share, we would love to hear your feedback on Gartner Peer Insights!

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